Title Pending: Another DADA Professor Tale
by Gale
Summary: New Year. New Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor. Set in year six. OC. In need of a beta. Please Read and Review.


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Title Pending - Another DADA Professor Tale

Written by Gale

Author's Note/Disclaimer - All JK Rowling characters are hers. I tried to be nice to them. The OC, Raithen Cain, is my creation. To those of you who saw the title and sensed impending canon doom, I hope the story is satisfying, and either way it is your feedback that I most greatly desire. This fic, set in year six of Harry Potter, is actually an aside to another I have posted and unfinished, called _Namesake, _which attempts to follow Rowling's style more closely and goes largely from Harry's point of view. This fic follows the pov of the new DADA Professor. Why? Because I got stuck and bored. Reading the other fic isn't required to understand anything in this piece, I should hope.

Standard Warnings: Original Character story. Wangst to come. Probably language and violence. And maybe even a Snapemance, if I can stomach it. Enjoy.

Chapter #1: The Interview

"Butter toffee?"

"No, thank you." Having spent years away from school, it was more than unnerving for Raithen Cain to be sitting in Albus Dumbledore's office, a grown woman, and feeling like she was twelve all over again. The Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry had not changed in the least, from his half moon spectacles to his heavy beard down to his veiled attempts to sway his guests by way of sugar-induced euphoria. Right loopy old man he was, but sharp. If he were anyone else, she would have some suspicions about an old man like him offering sweets to every person he met.

Of course, that could have been her stomach talking. She was hungry but wasn't about to admit that weakness and lack of preparation to anyone. She needed to appear the picture of control and capability, after all. This was why, of course, she had to fight every urge to fidget in her seat; things would be so much more comfortable if she could get up and pace.

"The years have been kind to you," Dumbledore observed.

"And to you, Headmaster," she replied, though inwardly she doubted he even remembered her. Her eye followed his fingers as he leafed through her resume. She self-consciously kept her chin lifted; she was an active individual but family resemblances prevented her ever avoiding the eventual development of a slight double chin. Having her hair tied back out of her face only showed it off more. Wearing it down, however, would only succeed in making her look all the more disheveled and sloppy.

Her hands were starting to sweat. She wrung them in her lap, all the while minding where Dumbledore's eyes went on the paper, gauging any reaction as he came to different places.

Albus Dumbledore set the sheaf of papers aside to regard her more fully. "Do you have any experience teaching?"

Raithen frowned, at first troubled that he would ask such a question when it was all in writing in front of him. She drew a breath in through her nose for patience and collected her answer. "Yes," she replied, though hurriedly she added, "but not children. I trained Aurors in the later years of my service to the Ministry."

"Our students are not soldiers, Miss Cain. They will require a bit more sensitivity than witches and wizards that are hardened for that line of work."

She nodded, "I understand, Headmaster. I myself was a student once, if you will remember."

He smiled at her, his eyes gleaming. "Yes, I do remember."

She did not want to know what recollection, exactly, she had inspired just then, if she had at all.

"What makes you feel that you are the most qualified to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts?" he asked, folding his hands on the desk in front of him.

Raithen mentally winced, though her face did not shift an inch. She sat back an inch or so and frowned more deeply when a lock of her red hair escaped from the tail it was all tied in. She tucked it back behind her ear, determined not to allow this interview to unravel like she, herself, was beginning to. "I feel that my training as an Auror and further on as I led expeditions internationally has prepared me to instruct in the art of defense, Headmaster. Further more, I --"

She was not sure what had stopped her speaking, only that sound stopped coming, and any thought of what she had been planning to say dropped from her mind. Dumbledore watched her still expectantly, and she fought against a rush of blood to her cheeks.

It was official: this interview was unsalvageable. She was stuttering, her hair was falling down, she hated kids and those butter toffees were starting to look _really _good. Raithen sighed, relenting. "I don't feel I am most qualified to be your new teacher, Headmaster," she said, her eyes falling away from him for the first time since she'd come in. "Firstly because I do not know who else has applied. Secondly --" Her voice lowered, the blush on her face deepening and canceling out the dot of light freckles that always plagued her face in the summer months. "-- Secondly because -- well, the only thing that drove me to ask for an interview was that I need the work."

Albus Dumbledore rose from his seat and strode around his desk to stand next to her. For the longest time, the most she would allow herself to see of him was the train of purple velvet around his feet that was his robes. With every painstaking moment of silence, however, she knew he was waiting for her eyes, so heavily she looked up.

He was smiling at her. "You will be contacted soon, Miss Cain," he said. "Thank you for coming all this way."

Her heart sank. That was it. She'd lost her chance. Of all the rotten luck. She nodded and rose slowly from her chair. "Thank you for seeing me, Headmaster. Good day."

"Good day, Miss Cain."

Raithen carried herself back to the family estate that day, officially unemployed. Stepping out of the barn floo, she brushed some soot from her robes and coughed with discomfort. Her hair, which had been falling down before, was completely free, and as such had become a stringy, dusty mess after the trip through the network. But she was home, now; she didn't really care.

I need to get the Elves in here to clean that out, she thought as she glanced back at the fireplace she'd stepped out of. She might have just floo'd from the Three Broomsticks, but the sheer amount of dirt that occurred upon re-entry was ridiculous.

Much to the paranoid joy of her now deceased parents, the barn fireplace was the only way to get onto the property. It was also heavily warded. Even though she was the one to come through, she could feel alarms going off in her head alerting her of her own presence.

Not that she did not enjoy the extra security herself.

She picked her way out of the barn and strode across the grounds toward the looming Cain Estate. It was uncommonly hot, she realized. She weighed in her mind whether going for a therapeutic run was worth the sunburn, and resolved that after losing her chance at her first job in months, she would rather eat the contents of the pantry.

Coming indoors, now, to the kitchen, and overjoyed to feel the cool rush of a draft charm wash over her face, Raithen drew her wand from her robes and cast a cleaning charm. The dirt and soot on the protruding white sleeves of her work shirt vanished, and the sweat from both her nerves and the walk to Hogsmeade from the school vanished. Despite the massive failure the interview had been, she almost felt better.

Of course, that was the perfect time for her to step through her mother as the ghost appeared before her. Elizabeth Cain guffawed at her daughter's lack of consideration and placed her hands on her hips, none of her nagging qualities lost in death. "Well, how did it go?" she demanded.

"Not now, Mother," Raithen uttered in distraction as she worked the buttons of her overrobe. Finally freeing them, she slid the long-vest off her shoulders and draped it over a nearby chair.

Elizabeth wrinkled her nose. "I knew it. Dumbledore rejected you, didn't he?"

"I said _not now_, Mother."

"Yes, yes, I know." The shade drifted into the hallway beyond. "Finish whatever you are doing and come to the drawing room. Your Father wants to hear about it as well."

Raithen had to roll her eyes. Much were the habits of her parents so thorough in their lives that they could not renounce them even after they had passed on. Meet with them in the drawing room every evening for chats, though they had run out of things to talk about short of Raithen's lack of work. They would not even walk through walls. It was as though, just like it had been their duty to put off the image of a well-to-do wizard family in life, they had to maintain that living image even when all the life was gone from them.

She threw the doors to the walk-in pantry open, and may very well have entered had she not the discretion to stop herself from stepping on the house elf standing in her way.

Gibset was the oldest house elf in the home, and he had been present even before Raithen had been born. As her parents had been entirely too busy to deal with her in her early years, it had been the job of several house elves to keep her busy and watched over while the ones that bore her attempted to hijack some status for themselves. Since the old bats were too stuck in their ways to cross over, they remained, to the house elves, as the masters of the house, and the things as a result hardly ever did anything Raithen told them to if they thought it would make them derelict in their duties to treat her like she was still seven. The others were not so bad as Gibset because most of them were newer to the household.

Needless to say, when she nearly trampled him, Gibset did not let that, nor the groan emanating in her throat, get by. "Young Misses is hungry?"

"Yes. I will get something myself, if you don't min--"

"Afternoon tea is nearly prepared, Young Misses. You is not needing to spoil it."

How something so small could be so condescending, Raithen had no idea.

"I don't plan to. I just wanted to have one --"

Gibset barred the way again when she attempted to go around him. "Now Young Misses, the Master would not be happy with Gibset if he was letting you spoil your meal like that." He spoke in a slow, overly sensible voice that always made her think of one of her more annoying teachers back at school. He took a step toward her, and out of habit more than intimidation she retreated from him, effectively chased away from her one source of consolation for the day. "Off with you now, Young Misses. The Master and Misses is waiting for you in the parlor, they is, and you should not keeps them waiting, no."

As Raithen rounded toward the hallway and out of the kitchen, she cursed herself for missing this job opportunity. If anything, it would give her an excuse to not come home to this house, the only place in the world where she still seemed to be a child to all those concerned.

Coming reluctantly to the parlor, she found her way to her usual seat, just across from the chairs her parents "occupied." Algernon Cain had been a stocky man in life and somewhat portly. From the perpetual frown to the larger bone structure, Raithen was very much his daughter; the only claim her mother had to her making was her diminutive height.

Judging by her father's stance, Raithen knew that if he were capable of smoking at that very moment, he would. She would catch him now and again mimicking the gestures of a person who had a pipe in their hands, though right now he was trying very forcefully not to. Right now, this impulse came mainly due to stress. Her mother was making a point not to look directly at either of them, a sure sign that she had told Algernon how she believed the interview had gone before Raithen, herself, could come and make her case.

"Your mother tells me things did not go well," he said in his usual sandpapery voice.

Bingo.

"Not as well as I'd hoped, no," she answered coolly.

Algernon Cain examined her with a critical arch of one eyebrow, much as he always did. "Well, if your manner of _dress _had anything to do with it, I am sure you are already aware."

Raithen glowered. There was little wrong with her clothing, rather modest, if she did say so herself. Slacks and a white shirt. Very modest. Well, short of the fact that men's dress-shirts did not hide white brassieres terribly well, but she had been wearing the long-vest on top of it.

"Really, child, are women's robes really so uncomfortable? You look like some feminist, muggle-loving radical."

"W-what your Father means, dear," Elizabeth put in, always dutifully sticking up for every insult her husband could think of, "is that you may dress a little too -- _progressively _for an institution like Hogwarts."

"Though probably not with that Albus Dumbledore still running things," Algernon muttered.

"The way I dressed had nothing to do with it," she said tightly.

"I'm sure it wasn't," her mother said quickly, in her best _mommy's not the enemy _voice, "perhaps your hair? You really should have it straightened and thinned, darling. It would be so much more manageable that way."

"Stop it, Mother."

"Probably all the better for you in the end," Algernon continued, reaching up as though to grab the base of a pipe, and finding nothing there he held his chin instead. "Teaching is a terrible profession if you are trying to find a husband."

"Which I'm _not_."

"Nonsense, Raithen. You're nearly thirty-four."

"And praying for menopause."

Algernon and Elizabeth blistered visibly at that, an interesting feat for ghosts. It was as though the very air around them shuddered.

"Really, dear, must you be so brusque?" her mother asked. "You don't really mean that. You'll want children someday."

Every time she said that -- _you'll want children someday_ -- Raithen only felt a stronger desire to prove her wrong even more. Though lately, Elizabeth said it with so much less confidence in her voice.

"A-and a good husband to support you," she added.

"We have been over this many times," Raithen insisted. "I am not interested in marrying, or giving you grandchildren."

Elizabeth made a noise that sounded much like a whimper as her eyes rolled toward her husband. She wrung her hands in her lap, and were she capable, Raithen was sure that she would force tears.

Algernon made a point not to look so effected by her statement, merely nonplussed, as though he did not believe her any more about that than he would have believed her if she told him she wanted to join the circus. "Don't go upsetting your mother like that. You needn't be so petty."

"Petty?" she echoed.

"Yes, petty. You've always been like that. What with the Aurors, and your jumping from job to job since. All of them so far away, and then you come back here with no plans, no future for our family --"

"Joy! Tea's here!" Raithen exclaimed as the table between their seats was in a flourish covered with cakes and tea and other treats. She grasped up a cucumber sandwich and had to resist shoving the whole thing into her mouth at once, just to keep herself from saying something unsavory to her father. When he and her mother were upset, they had a way of trolling the house for hours doing nothing but moaning, and it was more than irritating when she was trying to concentrate on her studies.

Algernon Cain held her forcibly innocent gaze for a long moment before relenting. "I am not worried. There were ads in the Daily Prophet that you could look into."

Mostly secretarial positions and dreck that no sane human being with half a sickle to their name would take, Raithen thought morosely. However, mention of the Daily Prophet did prompt a change of subject from her. "I've also read in there that there has been another murder."

Her father nodded gravely. "Another body with the Dark Mark?"

"Yes. This time they could identify the corpse, though. Narcissa Malfoy." Raithen reminded herself not to speak around bits of food and swallowed. Though after the arrest of Ministry Official, Lucius Malfoy, she had suspected his wife was one of the Deatheaters, too, she made a point to look surprised for the sake of her parents. "Never would have thought her to be the like."

"Indeed," Algernon murmured, casting a sidelong glance at his wife. "Nasty business that. What with someone going around and tearing Deatheaters to pieces; I don't care who they serve."

"They're not tearing pieces off," Raithen corrected. "Just their heads."

Elizabeth looked nervous, never the one to appreciate crude language or talk of such disturbing things.

"I'll look into tomorrow's post," her daughter said, finally relenting and knowing she would have no peace to eat unless she appeased them. "I did not see anything in today's that would be satisfactory."

"That's a good girl," Algernon beamed.

Two days later, just when Raithen Cain had come very close to accepting a position at the local book shop and on the same day that all students received their supply lists or invitations from Hogwarts, a letter of employment arrived.

TO BE CONTINUED…


End file.
